
Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO - andygcook
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/09/17/gitlab-doubles-valuation-to-nearly-3-billion/
======
ko3us
We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now.

What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that.

We are now a paying customer.

Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and
integrates really easily with AWS and GCP.

Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s
dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer
service I’ve experienced.

Their product is feature rich, priced right and is easy.

I’m amazed at how the operate. Kudos to the team

~~~
umvi
> Their integrated CICD is amazing.

My company switched to BitBucket in order to pinch pennies, and now I weep
when I have to get Jenkins and BitBucket to play nice with each other or to do
something. GitLab CI _just works_ , is easily horizontally scalable without
paying exorbitant prices for more "agents", etc... I miss GitLab...

~~~
alipang
My company is currently considering switching away from GitLab CI/CD as well
as we've found no way to increase the number of available minutes (2000 on our
tier I believe, doesn't last very long) without upgrading many tiers before we
can even scale it at all. Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since
your company wants to pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

~~~
umvi
> Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since your company wants to
> pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

We are small compared to FAANG, but not "small" small (~4000 employees total).

We run our own self-hosted GitLab EE instance, so we have "infinite" CI
minutes in that the runners are on all our own hardware. So CI is "free" (but
we pay for and maintain our own hardware/VMs so I'm not sure how much that
costs).

~~~
martimarkov
Take a look at [https://medium.com/sharenowtech/serverless-gitlab-runner-
bui...](https://medium.com/sharenowtech/serverless-gitlab-runner-builds-on-
lambda-ded4b24b3c4f)

Might be useful for you depending on how long your builds take. I haven't
personally used it but I it's one of the things on my todo list for next
month.

------
petercooper
Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source
projects?

I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in
this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just
checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I
cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source
repos.

Lest you think it's just me, compare
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com)
to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com)
.. the first is packed with projects posted here on a daily basis. The latter?
13 project links in about 50 days.

~~~
toupeira
There are some high-profile FOSS projects using GitLab, but they're not as
visible as they would be on GitHub because they host their own instances:

\- [https://gitlab.gnome.org/](https://gitlab.gnome.org/)

\- [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/)

\- [https://salsa.debian.org/](https://salsa.debian.org/) (AFAIK this is an
ongoing migration)

Others are considering a migration:

\- KDE: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/issues/24900](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/24900)

\- GNU Emacs: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/issues/28152](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/28152)

Maybe someday we'll have federation to work around this:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/30672](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/issues/30672) :-)

~~~
btasovac
The Debian migration is actually finished.

~~~
toupeira
Awesome, as a long-time Debian user myself that makes me very happy :)

------
pm90
Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most
certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub
support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise
customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to
documentation, and then be completely ignored.

Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many things that
can make life easier for users (better configurability for CODEOWNERS
notification?) and they will flat out ignore you.

Gitlab on the other hand seem much more responsive to users... their actions
speak volumes. They recognized the need for integrated CI/CD with code and
instead of stealing TravisCIs ideas (cough GitHub Actions Cough), they built
one years ago.

I really do hope they grow to be the tool of choice for devs. GitHub has lost
its way: from being the place that devs loved, to a corporate soul sucking
behemoth made of a seemingly insensitive product team.

Gitlab on the other hand, release new features, have better support, give
interesting talks etc. Very excited to see where they go and I wish them the
very best.

~~~
aeonflux
I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information
about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just
downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I
managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still
recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I
should just FO.

~~~
scient
So you are blaming them for your own fault?

~~~
gnud
Pretty sure he's blaming them for deleting all his configurations, not for
disabling them once the CC bounced.

And I agree. If that happened to me, I would move, without a doubt.

------
ta478447guu
They seem to have achieved golden child status on HN, and from my experiences
its hard to see why. Glad there's a non-Microsoft option, but I wish it were
another whole setup.

Support is non-existent, clunky CI infrastructure, barebones all over. They
seem to just be good at reacting in public threads.

~~~
irq11
The excitement for gitlab on HN has always been a combination of “open source
enthusiasm” and astroturfing. From personal experience, HN is filled with
tire-kickers who will hug the crap out of any halfway-usable product that they
can “migrate to” for free (and abandon said product as soon as a payment form
appears). It’s a misleading signal.

Even on this thread, you can count on one hand the number of commenters who
actually say they pay to use the product. The trick is to use that noise to
leverage yourself into markets where people actually pay money for things.

~~~
joshlambert
The breakdown is probably close to the percentage of paying versus open source
customers that we have.

We are working to better educate our users on the value that our paid version
can offer, but it is very important for us to be good stewards of the open
source community that has grown around the project. You can read more about
our pricing strategy and stewardship here:
[https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-
features-...](https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-are-
paid-only)

On the revenue side, Sid publicly shared an update recently:
[https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21](https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21)

~~~
irq11
please stop astroturfing.

~~~
themacguffinman
He's not astroturfing, astroturfing requires deception.

~~~
irq11
whatever you want to call it, it’s spammy and more than a little desperate.

~~~
emilycook
Sorry if you find this spammy! It's huge news for us and we all (of course
lol) have a vested interest in making sure the company succeeds. Since we
don't have Microsoft funding to enable us to throw resources at everything in
our backlog, we rely heavily on user experience to help us prioritize. Which
just so happens to come up much more organically on sites where devs are more
empowered to voice their opinions freely :)

~~~
irq11
Nonsense. You have hundreds of employees and a multi-billion dollar valuation,
and you keep making the same excuses.

I have been watching you folks spam threads, over and over again, for years,
with the same things: “we’re fixing performance!”, “making the UI better is a
priority!”

The user complaints never change.

Instead of spamming threads with guerilla marketing, make your software
better. What was cute when the company was four guys and a computer now just
appears calculated and manipulative.

------
boldslogan
A cool part from the article

>> part of a shadow program in which employees spend two weeks sitting in on
their CEO’s meetings, feedback sessions and media or analyst calls

Does anyone know of companies that do this "internship" / shadowing /
mentoring built into the company?

~~~
ecbrinkman
Thanks for highlighting this! I was lucky enough to get to be the shadow this
week, and it's been an incredible experience.

The program is outlined in our handbook if you want to find out more info:
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/)

~~~
boldslogan
Ah from the handbook

You are eligible to apply for the program if you have accepted an offer at
GitLab as a:

Director or up, Distinguished engineer or up, or Senior product manager or up.
Manager or Staff engineer, if there is 1 consideration. Individual
Contributor, if there are 2 considerations.

I was thinking more like olden times where you work your way up from the
delivery boy spot or something and this was a chance to do it. Maybe I
misunderstood?

~~~
sokoloff
In what way would this be contrary to that? It’s not like delivery boy to CEO
was a five year pipeline in the “good old days” either.

------
harrisonjackson
I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org
over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd.
The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a
host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never
had any issues with it.

My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment
variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match + scrub aws secret
keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem in a cicd setup.

> masked so they are hidden in job logs, though they must match certain regexp
> requirements to do so

We've been able to work around it, but it did make that particular automation
more difficult.

~~~
jl-gitlab
Hey, CI/CD PM here. I'd love to learn more about how you're using GitLab for
mobile, if you're up for it ping me at @jlenny on gitlab.com. It's an area of
focus for us, and it's always great to get to know another person who is using
that use case.

~~~
harrisonjackson
We use it with Fastlane to automate our entire build and delivery pipeline. We
set it up for our mobile clients, too, and it saves us a lot of time getting
code shipped quickly.

We have a Mojave VM configured with Xcode, Fastlane, and the gitlab runner.

We automate uploads to Appetize.io for every feature branch so that QA and
clients can test out new features in a simulator running in the browser.

We automate builds and uploads to Apple test flight and Google playstore alpha
tracks on our develop branch.

The gitlab runner is by far the most reliable and easiest to setup part of the
whole deal with the worst being maybe cocoapods or npm for the projects that
rely on them (react-native).

I'll ping you on gitlab. Happy to go into more detail!

~~~
orf
> react-native

We've recently run into an issue with building react-native on Gitlab-CI,
where apparently the build process spins up a file watcher in the background
which quickly exhausts the open file descriptors.

Have you experienced anything like this? We are using stock react-native and
not customizing anything.

~~~
harrisonjackson
Haven't had this issue, no. Are you running into the same problem if you build
the app without the runner? The file watcher (do you mean metro?) shouldn't be
running during a production build since the files aren't changing, right?

------
ryanmcbride
At my last job Gitlab was in the stack and I had never used it before so I was
expecting it to be a real pain. It was actually a perfectly pleasant
experience. I don't think it'll make me leave Github but I put them at the
same level now.

Merge Requests never felt right saying over Pull Requests, even though it's
more descriptive of what's actually happening.

~~~
banachtarski
I'm being pedantic here, but the reason I prefer pull is because it feels more
general than a "merge," which to me precludes a fetch/rebase. I guess you
could consider it a merge -ff-only, but in a mergeless-master workflow, "merge
request" felt awkward.

~~~
Nimitz14
But it's wrong. It's actually a "push" instead of "pull", the direction is
away from what you're doing not towards you!

~~~
banachtarski
It’s a pull “request,” i.e. a request for someone else to pull your changes. I
don’t follow your argument.

~~~
Nimitz14
Or viewed from another perspective (the person initiating) a request for
someone else to accept the changes you are pushing.

------
dpflan
I am curious how the Gitlab is so valuable. I've never used the service, but
HN posts keep me informed superficially. Could someone explain the valuation?

~~~
s_dev
Because Microsoft paid for GitHub -- since GitLab is well positioned to
compete with GitHub, cash rich companies like Apple or Google could be
interested purely to keep up the Jones's.

~~~
dpflan
Thanks. Do you have any insight into MSFT's strategy for GitHub? I assume it
helps make it seem developer friendly, data-mining, identifying projects/new
ideas of value and validation, and is part of their becoming more of a cloud
company strategy.

~~~
s_dev
> Do you have any insight into MSFT's strategy for GitHub?

Between LinkedIn and GitHub they probably have the best data for identifying
great devs/engineers as well as encouraging future devs to use their products.
Soft power.

~~~
dpflan
This is very interesting, as means of finding talent before its larger
competitors do. The discussion about how Google has a “deep bench” to deal
with shifting and departures seems to apply here conceptually.

------
asdkhadsj
Related question. Is it possible to use Gitlab CI with a runner running on
your own hardware to get unlimited CI time? I'd like to take a machine at my
home and use it to run automated tests/etc, especially because some of the
integration tests can be quite long _(ie, chewing up CI minutes)_.

I thought this was possible, but after searching I was often confused. I
imagine I'm using poor terms during my search. Thoughts?

~~~
mcintyre1994
Yep, we do this on GitLab.com - it’s one of the most well thought through
systems I’ve worked with tbh. We use autoscaling EC2 spot instances for almost
everything, incredibly cost efficient and unlimited.

~~~
eblanshey
Just curious how this works out for you? When I tried this, even when the spot
bid was way above current price, it would often be stuck in a pending state
since spot instances don't get created immediately. Do you get spot instances
to be created immediately on demand somehow?

~~~
mcintyre1994
Yep we see spot instances immediately created - there's no noticeable delay
(compared to build times) against having permanent EC2 instances running. For
our runners we want to use spot instances, the important part of the gitlab-
runner register command are:

    
    
      --executor docker+machine \
      --machine-machine-driver amazonec2 \
      --machine-machine-options "amazonec2-request-spot-instance=true \
      --machine-machine-options "amazonec2-spot-price="
    

That last one means our bid defaults to the current on-demand price, which
seems to get fulfilled immediately. FWIW we're using m4.large instances in eu-
west-1a and according to the AWS UI the spot price has been perfectly
consistent (at about 1/3 of on-demand) for at least the last 3 months so maybe
that consistency is why it works so well for us.

~~~
eblanshey
Thanks, I'll try this out! Has it ever happened that it doesn't get created
immediately for whatever reason? And if that happens, will it automatically
cancel the request and/or pipeline within X minutes, so that it doesn't
randomly get fulfilled like a month later?

------
dijit
While my org uses perforce extensively; we also have a gitlab premium license
(with far too many seats than we have users due to a fuck-up deploying
mattermost org wide then promptly disbanding the effort after the damage was
done) which we use enjoyably.

Despite the fact the people who host our gitlab internal do not update it
often or support it well I do think it’s a great product at the enterprise
level.

So much so that I host one myself for my IRC community to use!

Glad it’s working out for them.

~~~
Arathorn
what happened with the MM deploy ooi?

~~~
dijit
Microsoft came and gave us teams “for free”. And since we’d tied mattermost to
gitlab, every mattermost user (non-developer) was (is) costing us money. :/

------
ltbarcly3
I just want to address 'valuation' quickly for people who may not be familiar
with how this is made up.

Lets say I have a peanut cart, and in my sack I have 10,000 peanuts. Some
sucker comes along and invests in the peanut cart, and I sell him 1 peanut's
worth of the cart for $1.00. By the usual rules of 'valuation', the valuation
of my sack of peanuts is now $10,000.00.

Valuation just means what someone somewhere estimates the value to be, it
doesn't have to be credible. It becomes more significant when investments are
made, since if an investor puts in money at a valuation of X, they are betting
that the company will find liquidity at some point in the future with a
valuation greater than X, or the investor will lose money (even this is not
true, since they will likely have liquidation preference or other backstops to
protect themselves at the expense of founders and employees).

The short version is, valuation is not what the company is actually worth, or
even an impartial estimate or appraisal. It is purely the amount invested
divided by the fraction of the company that investment purchased (even if the
fraction is small), and it ignores things like liquidation preference that let
investors hedge risk when they invest money at valuations that make no sense.

~~~
zrail
Yes. All of that said, if you're an insider with equity you'll have access to
a 409A valuation, which _does_ take all of that into account when coming up
with the number. It's closer to what the market will pay for common stock in a
theoretical IPO at the time of valuation. It's definitely not in any way what
the market will _actually_ pay in a _real_ IPO.

~~~
ltbarcly3
It's closer, being less, but too often $0 is closer still!

------
gmiller123456
Silly question: What are "CI pipeline minutes"? I read their FAQ which just
says it's minutes used on their "runners", which only changes the question to
"What are runners, and where do they fit in?"

I figured out CI means Continuous Integration, which is something I don't use,
nor want to. I'm mainly just interested to know if this comes in to play if I
just want to use GitLab to publicly share code like on Github.

~~~
HeavyStorm
But I am curious... Why wouldn't you want to use a CI?

~~~
gmiller123456
For anything I'd put on Git*b, it's largely unnecessary, as they'd just be
tiny pet projects that only I would ever update. I'm surprised when I even get
someone looking at my repos, let alone contributing to them.

------
alexis_fr
Is it related to Atlassian’s huge price increase (40% to 320%) for Server
licenses? They try to push everyone to the cloud, almost by force. It made the
stock (NASDAQ:TEAM) lose about 16% in 20 days.

[https://info.seibert-
media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+P...](https://info.seibert-
media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+Price+Increase+October+2019)

------
kimjongtrill
kind of wish they had kept it a little more lightweight. been running v7.10.5
as a personal repo on a small-ish sized vps. went to upgrade/migrate to a
newer version the other day and the recent versions crash out on the same host
configuration. i eventually got it up and running but it was sluggish and
nearly unusable.

sticking with v7.10.5 for now but i will probably switch to gogs or something
similar soon.

~~~
0xffff2
Sluggish and nearly unusable describes every experience I have ever had with
GitLab.

~~~
dsumenkovic
Thanks for the feedback. We are working hard to improve performance and memory
consumption of GitLab. We have two major projects underway, switching to Puma
[1] as well as reducing the overall memory consumption of GitLab [2].

You can follow along on some of the progress we are making in each release
post in the "Performance Improvements" section. For 12.2 you can see we had 58
MR's related to performance.

[1] -
[https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html)

[2] -
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/)

[3] - [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/-/merge_requests?scope=...](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=&state=merged&label_name%5B%5D=performance&milestone_title=12.2)

~~~
stevekemp
I've heard this from gitlab employees before.

Every. Single. Release. For. The. Past. Two. Years.

At some point it seems clear that despite statements to the contrary the speed
of the instance, and the resource consumption just cannot be a concern.

I'd rather the core was speedy and resource-appropriate than see additional
half-working features bolted on non-stop, while bug reports languish.

~~~
emilycook
Hello! We haven't been at the capacity employee-wise to have teams dedicated
to improve much in these areas, but we tripled our employee count this year
and have since spun up a memory team [1] and are able to dedicate more people
to performance [2]. So hopefully we won't be saying this for much longer!

\---

[1] (same link as #2 above)
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/)

[2]
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/)

------
exabrial
Github long ago realized how unprofitable support is when you have a monopoly.
Glad to see GitLab carving up a market segment.

~~~
jansan
I thought the Github support department is called "Stackoverflow".

------
keithwhor
Congrats, GitLab team. Way to build an impressive business.

When anybody tells you there are rules to venture capital — like it’s
impossible to take on massive incumbents that have network effects — ignore
them. The GitLab team is doing something phenomenal here.

Enjoy your success! You’ve earned it.

~~~
sytse
Thank you! GitHub is unchallenged in open source but it turns out you can
change all the people in one company to a new tool without much of a problem,
especially if you can replace 10 other tools.

------
cj
Question to current Gitlab users: Why do you use Gitlab instead of Github?
What are the killer features that make it worth switching to?

~~~
trumbitta2
The "Create merge request" (from issue) button.

It creates a new branch, with a smart name like 123-my-issue-title, and a new
"pull request" for that issue and branch.

~~~
willis936
This sounds similar to Atlassian’s Jira/Bitbucket integration without the
jira.

~~~
ndarwincorn
GitLab's value prop can be more or less summed up as 'everyone else gives you
ala carte tools, we give you one that's unified'.

------
NicoJuicy
Is Sytse on vacation? It's the first time I don't see a response from him :p

~~~
deskamess
Possibly SEC rules and/or advice from lawyers to only say anything when needed
- they are at or getting to a critical point in the journey. The PR/support
staff can run the comments for now.

~~~
sytse
Funding secured.

------
pepemon
Well maybe they will either backport or accept community implementation of
merge request approval functionality now [1]. With all kudos to the GitLab
team, absence of this feature while all other major players free tiers have it
is quite a nonsense. Anyway, GitLab is really solid platform with pleasant
OOBE. Always recommend it to anyone.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/issues/20696](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/20696)

------
sam1r
Confirming I have used GitLab across 10 different domains/entities/projects &
have had zero issues. IMO... both GH + GL are here to stay. Here's how I
evaluate how to use for each one.

=> GitHub = OSS street cred. [You might want to get hired or want to showcase
your skills]

=> GitLab = Business/Enterprise related. [You might want to earn $/make a
living... you know.. following your countries' compliancy]

FWIW...My two cents...Both great products, however, different use cases.

~~~
nscalf
Totally agree with this, I think a lot of it stems from Github getting open
source code in early and Gitlab having free private repos. I use Gitlab
because of that. All of the open source work I did is done through Github.

Ultimately, I'm glad they both exist, my go to is Gitlab though. And I'll be
looking closely at their IPO to be an investor.

------
dcchambers
Does Gitlab release user statistics? I am curious to know how many _active_
users they have.

~~~
YorickPeterse
As far as I know we don't have any recurring reports on data like this, though
I think we may have mentioned it in the odd blog post in the past.

------
nl
_its annualized revenue is growing at a rate of 143% year-to-year, with net
retention of customer spending at 153%._

Net dollar retention is the metric anyone judging a SAAS business should be
looking at. 153% is nearly the best I've ever seen - Twilio was 155%, Slack
140% at IPO[1], Sendgrid 115%, Mulesoft 117%[2]

[1] [https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-
lines/](https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/)

[2] [https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-
retention/](https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention/)

------
factorialboy
Original announcement: [https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-
funding/](https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-funding/)

------
cityzen
Honest question from someone that knows nothing about valuations, does this
seem kind of ridiculous? Aside from investors basically making this stuff up,
is there any actual validity to a billion dollar valuation anymore? What would
I look at (aside from %s) that would show me, someone that knows nothing about
finance, that this company is this valuable? What is their actual revenue? I’m
mostly curious to see how reality stacks up against hope and what the actual
financial outcome of this would be outside of seeming like these companies are
being dumped on the market for a big payout.

------
RivieraKid
Why so much? I would guess that you should be able to build this from scratch
for something like 1% of that valuation.

~~~
amelius
My guess too. I'm almost tempted to start coding :)

------
vvram
Well deserved ! Kudos to the team, staying true to their Vision and execution.

------
mlindner
I honestly hate gitlab compared to github. So many broken features and half
implemented things. It's got all the same problems Jira has (as compared to
GitHub which is amazing to use).

~~~
emilycook
Hi, GitLab employee here. Sorry to hear that! This funding should enable us to
throw more resources at maturing some of our features (e.g. we tripled our
employee count this year). We spun up this product maturity page to make this
a little more transparent:
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/)

~~~
mlindner
Can you please fix in-line commenting? I should be able to click and drag
several lines and leave a comment on those several lines specifically. This is
something everything from reviewboard to github have had for ages but gitlab
still doesn't have. Additionally, gitlab defaults to lots of files not showing
their contents in the diff which is extremely frustrating as I need to go
click several times to enable the diff.

------
lswainemoore
Gitlab is great! Most major downside from my perspective is that the diffing
functionality is much worse than Github's. Super slow + resource intensive.

~~~
emilycook
Hi! GitLab employee, we have an epic open here to improve diff performance:
[https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/-/epics/1816](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816)

~~~
lswainemoore
Thanks! Glad to hear it. I will be an especially happy camper if this means
that file folding works efficiently.

------
JalisRahat
We are Gitlab customers since 2019 and I can tell you that your expectations
for what support can do for you are very unrealistic.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Please give gitlab some more money so they can enhance development. My
experience with gitlab has not been the best.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559)
But congrats to the team too. It's good to see another startup succeeding for
delivering real value.

------
preommr
I still don't understand how github was worth 7+ billion.

------
cfv
How does this even work? Like, does one plainly submit a form to the govt
saying "yeah just double it" or what? I never actually got the hang of how
this things are defined; can anyone ELI5?

~~~
jdoliner
It occurs as part of a fundraising process in which an investor invests money
at a valuation that's double the previous one. As part of that there are forms
filed that effectively say: "yeah just double it" but you don't file this
forms outside of a fundraising process.

------
jonbronson
Still waiting on better monorepo support in GitLab.

~~~
emilycook
Hi! Better support for monorepos is in our roadmap, you can see our handbook
entry here:
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integra...](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integration/#monorepos-
and-cross-project-pipelines)

and the relevant epic: [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/-/epics/915](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/915)

------
OrgNet
triple it... and gimme 20k, only.

------
larryyangsen
We use gitlab.com with drone CICD.

------
johnapridonidze
wow

------
timwayne16
I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org
over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd.
The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a
host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never
had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask
protected environment variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match
+ scrub aws secret keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem
in a cicd setup.

------
benj111
I like how, considering all the wework shenanigans, they just unquestioningly
report a doubling in another unicorns value.

------
sieabahlpark
I don't see how it's worth that much unless their plan is to strip all
features from gitlab community or expect a Google acquisition.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I mean, with GitHub's price being 7.5 billion, it's not outrageous as one of
their leading competitors. I also was feeling like a Google acquisition wasn't
impossible, they did move their entire platform to Google Cloud recently.

Microsoft and Google seem on pretty good terms lately, but right now, a lot of
Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting platform. I
could see a day where Google says they need their own, buys GitLab, and moves
over everything.

~~~
arunc
> a lot of Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting
> platform

Curious to know what that platform is.

~~~
umeshunni
GitHub

------
iagooar
It's a shame they sold out so quickly to US investors (I think they are even
officially incorporated in the US now?).

They could have become Europe's largest software company, instead they chose
to follow the money.

To be fair, I guess significant European investment is still hard to come by
these days.

