
GitLab raises $100M from Iconiq, GV, and Khosla, at $1.1B valuation - sethbannon
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100-million-from-iconiq-gv-and-khosla-at-1-1-billion-valuation/
======
scrollaway
I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab
since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a
lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus.

Then very recently I've had to use Gitlab for a variety of new projects. And
just... wow, it has come a _long way_.

There is an incredible amount of tooling and features, native to Gitlab. It's
actually scary, and in some places even gets messy (feature overload). But a
lot of it is useful stuff Github really should be offering. Things like more
metadata on projects, subprojects. A very in-depth permission system (invite
users with read-only access, issue-only access; membership expiration, ...).
Branch protection integrated into various features.

Native CI! That's the big one. Travis is terrible. I used Gitlab CI to deploy
one of my most recent project and ... it's been great. Was very simple to
configure, felt a lot less magic and constrained than Travis, and it's very
well integrated into Gitlab.

All this to say that I'm just about converted. Unfortunately, I have my 10+
year old profile on Github which includes membership to various projects and
orgs, but I'm now pretty definitely using both platforms.

Edit: Here's my Github profile so people know I mean business when I'm
praising Gitlab.
[https://github.com/jleclanche](https://github.com/jleclanche)

~~~
tootie
I honestly don't understand why anyone uses GitHub for professional projects.
It's inferior to not only GitLab but also Bitbucket.

~~~
lazerwalker
I'm intimately familiar with GitHub's UI from both my OSS work and previous
employers. I know GitLab can do everything GitHub can do (and more!) but it
infuriates me how long it takes me to figure out how to do things I can do in
my sleep on GitHub's web UI.

I don't _think_ it's just a familiarity thing; I've been using it for months
and still haven't adjusted. Gitlab's UI/UX has gotten better by leaps and
bounds, and I prefer it to BitBucket, but it still feels like it has a ways to
go.

~~~
aae42
Starting out with GitLab and then moving back to GitHub, I feel the exact
same, but in reverse, heh, so you're not alone

~~~
lazerwalker
Hah! Utterly delightful. So much for thinking "oh, it absolutely _can 't_ be a
matter of familiarity"

------
cjdu
:/ This feels like a 100% reaction to the GitHub acquisition by VCs not
understanding the market. I'll bet the inbound to them was nuts the weeks
following the new. Good on Sid for fleecing the VCs though how GitLab ever
supports that valuation is beyond me.

~~~
pritianka
There'll be more about what made the VCs invest in the live stream tomorrow
(10 AM PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UTC). You can register at
[https://about.gitlab.com/webcast/whats-next-for-
gitlab/](https://about.gitlab.com/webcast/whats-next-for-gitlab/) but the
tl;dr is that the VCs have been following GitLab's progress and metrics for a
while now and it was not a kneejerk reaction (even though I get that the
timing might make it feel like that).

~~~
swsieber
Is there anyway to register for the live stream without giving up my work
email? I'd like to listen but don't feel like I should be giving away my
company contact info.

~~~
pritianka
Also, the live stream will be released on Youtube right after it's done.

------
therealmarv
Hope they put a lot of it (money) in their server infrastructure and better
management of incident handling on gitlab.com. Thinks can break or get slow
(sure) but their competitor (github) is in comparison rock solid. I cannot
even count the 503 or git downtimes on gitlab.com I hope they look on a lot of
worse case scenarios like e.g. an upgrade breaks things, DB issues etc. and
look how big big cloud installations are doing this stuff (staged updates,
roll backs etc.)

~~~
btasovac
We are heavily focusing on performance improvements - both in the product (so
that features run better)[1] and in our GitLab.com infrastructure team (so
that GitLab.com runs more reliably)[2]. Thank you for sharing your thoughts
candidly.

[1] - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests?label...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests?label_name%5B%5D=performance)

[2] - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues)

~~~
adtac
I'll just say that gitlab.com, in my experience, has been _much_ faster than
it used to be the past few weeks. Things now don't take forever, which is a
good thing. It's still slower than Github, but the improvement (due to the GCP
migration?) is quite visible. Keep moving forward :)

~~~
pritianka
Yay! Thanks for sharing the positive experience. We know .com performance is
something we need to improve and as mentioned in the comment above, are
working super hard to get there.

------
dopamean
Yikes that's a lot of money. I wonder if they'll still continue to pay
developers less than their peers because they live somewhere more affordable.

~~~
pritianka
We actually spoke to this topic in our Series C announcement last year. If we
pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are
effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more
expensive areas. By making it about the cost of living, we make sure everyone
is taken care of based on living needs. That said, we have an awesome chief
culture officer who is leading efforts to make sure our comp calculator is
fair and encourages people to apply.

~~~
jkaplowitz
This system fails badly when people move between cheap and expensive cities
over the course of their lives, and might need to build savings at expensive
city levels when living in a cheap city.

Why not just pay everyone at the expensive city level? If you were hiring a
true consultant rather than an employee or a full-time "contractor," you would
pay them solely based on value delivered and the defensibility of their
pricing given GitLab's business needs. Their cost of living wouldn't matter.

For employees at an all remote company, I don't see why their cost of living
should matter any more than that. And applicants in expensive cities would not
be dissuaded.

Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to
address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many
countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and
gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That
doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the
cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person
companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc.

~~~
giobox
I also find this methodology for paying engineers concerning.

It’s been a while since I last played with it, but I recall finding the
results from gitlab’s publicly accessible regional salary calculator producing
some pretty absurd results in the Bay Area.

I live 45 minutes from San Jose, and expect remuneration at levels
commensurate with my title and experience for the Bay Area in general, as
should anyone dealing with cost of living issues here. The gitlab calculator
however thinks I should earn 35k less, which feels like a punishment for
trying to live somewhere commutable that I can, you know, actually afford to
buy a house large enough for a normal family.

If I live in commute range of the same location, why pay me 35 grand less?
Should I apologise for my less desirable zip code?

> [https://about.gitlab.com/job-
> families/engineering/developer/](https://about.gitlab.com/job-
> families/engineering/developer/) (scroll down lots for the calculator)

~~~
detaro
I was wondering that too (since the calculator seems to think everything in
Germany outside a few large metros is supposed to cost the same, which is ...
unrealistic) and found [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-
operations/global-c...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-
operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates)

> _GitLabbers may select any metro area within one hour and forty-five minutes
> of their residence when determining their geographical area_

~~~
giobox
Ah that’s interesting, certainly assuages some of my concerns with this
approach, and would obviously allow almost all Bay Area employees to claim the
SF salary range.

Arguably the calculator should be configured to just select the maximum
permissible salary range inside the permitted radius based on a home zip code,
given that presumably everyone who accepts a job offer at gitlab will do this
manually anyway. You’d be foolish not to.

It’s still troubling how ‘wrong’ the numbers look for various regions I’m
familiar with though.

~~~
mikekchar
I can't find their calculator currently, but last time I looked they treated
all of Japan as Tokyo. It's kind of funny because although one could quibble
about the salary range they give for Tokyo, if I compare it to the salary that
someone would make in rural Japan (where I live), it's at least twice as much.

They've got their formula and I think it's probably fair to say that they
aren't paying at the top end of the range in expensive markets. Also by
scaling on cost of living, they are getting mismatches with the local market
-- both up and down. But it's a formula that's intended to be transparent. As
much as they say publicly that they want to be competitive in every market,
the reality is that a formula will never be able to achieve that.

I quite like their system. As a developer, I can look at what they are
offering and decide _before I apply_ if they are going to be in the ballpark
I'm looking at. Not everybody has to work at Gitlab. Gitlab also doesn't have
to hire all the best developers in every market -- their strategy is to hire
around the world. SV is the most expensive market in the world -- in many
cases by 1-2 binary orders of magnitude. Remote only companies don't have to
pay those prices and I don't see why they should. That Gitlab even tries to
hire in expensive markets is interesting to me. I'm not really sure what value
they are getting from it.

I know in the US (and especially SV) there is a feeling that expensive markets
attract the best talent. In my experience this isn't really true. In my
experience expensive markets attract _more_ people, but the range of ability
and experience is about the same. So you may have more great developers in
absolute numbers, but your chance of hiring them (especially if you are on a
budget) is not any higher at all (and in many cases quite a bit lower).

I should note, in closing, that I may be strange: I don't care at all what
anyone else makes in the company. I only care if people pay me what I want to
be paid. If someone else makes more, then good for them. If they make less,
then that's too bad. But I don't personally care either way.

------
dustinmoris
The reason why I think GitLab has been massively overvalued and why GitLab
will ultimately fail is because it is storming head on into becoming a stale
company.

Normally a startup is innovating in one vertical, disrupting the market with
new ideas or technology which enables users and the company itself to profit
of those innovations. This continues normally until the startup has become
number one in that vertical. Then it must defend its spot against other
newcomers who want to disrupt. Part of the defence is diversification, use the
capital to disrupt in other places as well. This has been the natural
progression of every successful business I know. At some point that company is
so big though, competing in so many verticals that it becomes stale. It stops
innovating and is constantly on the defence. Only innovation comes through
acquisition which is often just a way to defend your spot by buying early.

GitLab is sort of not even trying to become number one in one vertical. Like
the CEO said in his interview, GitLab already competes in 9 different
verticals (JIRA, Jenkins, GitHub, NewRelic, Artifactory, etc.) and they are
not near the top anywhere yet. They are going to become stale before even
reaching a single peak in any industry. So far they have not innovated
anything yet. Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9
different domains into one product", which is nothing more than a pricing
strategy and a lack of focus and not an innovation. It's painful to watch.
Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess.

~~~
shdh
Reads like a subjective hit piece.

>Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different
domains into one product"

They have one of the best CI/CD products out on the market right now. git
versioned yml/docker based jobs with multiple stages.

~~~
root_axis
The CI is pretty but it's definitely not a polished product, e.g. the job
progress indicators are unreliable on most pages, the "retry" functionality
for failed jobs periodically does nothing which forces developers to touch
their branch with a push to trigger a rebuild, the horribly named "tags"
feature is a source of constant confusion for developers new to gitlab who are
trying to trigger jobs based on git tags only to discover that "tags" in
gitlab-ci have literally no relationship to "tags" in the sense of tagging a
git commit. It's also impossible to do something as simple as trigger a job
only for tagged commits on a specific branch or skip certain steps in the
pipeline based on what happens at job run time. I like many other aspects of
gitlab but the CI is definitely less than ideal.

~~~
shdh
> The CI is pretty but it's definitely not a polished product, e.g. the job
> progress indicators are unreliable on most pages,

I agree with this, they need to do a better job of updated those circular
indicators.

> the "retry" functionality for failed jobs periodically does nothing which
> forces developers to touch their branch with a push to trigger a rebuild,

Not sure when you last used their CI, but I've never experienced this issue.

> the horribly named "tags" feature is a source of constant confusion for
> developers new to gitlab who are trying to trigger jobs based on git tags
> only to discover that "tags" in gitlab-ci have literally no relationship to
> "tags" in the sense of tagging a git commit.

A tag created through the GitLab web GUI is directly connected to `git tag`

> It's also impossible to do something as simple as trigger a job only for
> tagged commits on a specific branch or skip certain steps in the pipeline
> based on what happens at job run time. I like many other aspects of gitlab
> but the CI is definitely less than ideal.

I think you should refer to the manual.

* [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#only-and-except-simplifi...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#only-and-except-simplified) * [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#when](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#when) * [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/)

~~~
Drdrdrq
> > It's also impossible to do something as simple as trigger a job only for
> tagged commits on a specific branch or skip certain steps in the pipeline
> based on what happens at job run time...

> I think you should refer to the manual.

GP is correct - there is no way to do it. Workarounds posted on multiple
issues simply don't work. Official docs are vague on the matter, but the fact
is, GitLab doesn't support this common scenario. And a few others either while
we're at it... Like allowing me to schedule a manual job for when dependencies
finish. I have to wait every time and it's annoying as hell.

------
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
I started using GitLab a week ago. Only because they offer free private repos.
GitLab feels unpolished and I encountered so many small UI bugs. If they said
they are three people and just founded their startup, ok, sure. But Series D,
at a $1B valuation? I guess their priorities lie somewhere else.

~~~
sytse
What is the first thing you think we should fix?

~~~
elygre
Not gp, but: you have a marvelous security system, but GitLab Pages does not
use it. For an installation containing private/protected projects, this
severely limits the use of Pages.

For example, it is not possible to use Pages to build documentation that
should only be available to project members. Everything published to Pages is
available to the public.

~~~
sytse
Thanks! I see you also contributed this as an issue
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/33422](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33422) and we
plan to make this in the next 4-7 releases. Many of our users have a self-
managed installation that is behind the firewall so for them this is less
relevant. But we understand the urgency. And of course it would be even
quicker if someone can contribute this functionality.

~~~
donmcronald
I've been following that one for a long time. Someone started a contribution
for it ([https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/18589](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/18589)) and there's a GitLab person that appears to be very
responsive, so it's going to land eventually.

Once that lands, it would be amazing to have a way to leverage CI + pages +
auth to provide docs for external users. For years, I've been looking for a
way to host authenticated, infrequently used docs. There are no options.
Static sites on self-hosted, authenticated GitLab Pages would be perfect if I
didn't have to pay for every user.

------
sqs
Congrats to the GitLab team! They and a few other companies lately have shown
fantastic customer and revenue numbers around an open source product. (I mean,
a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more
important because that’s what it’s all based on.) This is an important step
toward increasing the % of all software that is open source.

Calling Joseph Jacks to give some data here... (I know some other names of
companies with tremendous numbers but don’t recall which are public info, so I
don’t want to risk it.)

~~~
pritianka
+1 to the "I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer
metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on." I've
been super impressed working with Sid that his eye is always on the prize and
he pushes us to work towards making our users and customers happy rather than
go after any vanity metrics. It's ironic but this is novel in the valley now
:p.

------
pritianka
This article by Frederic over at Techcrunch has an interview with Sid, our CEO
at GitLab. It should answer a lot of people's questions in the comments below.
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-
raises-100m/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/)

~~~
catwell
> As Sijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub
> and Bitbucket competitor [...] GitLab wants to be far more than that. It now
> offers products in nine categories

So basically, instead of being a GitHub competitor, it is now an Atlassian
competitor.

~~~
sytse
Atlassian is indeed broader then just BitBucket and a better comparison.
GitLab does a broader offering than Atlassian by including things like
packaging, monitoring, and security. And GitLab is a single application
instead of a suite of tools with different data models.

~~~
jtwaleson
The offering in most categories is already good enough (for our little startup
in Amsterdam), and we're still on the free tier! We only have to use a single
integrated SaaS offering which fits almost all of our needs. The CI/CD is far
beyond "good enough": it is fantastic, especially with runners on EC2 auto-
scaling. Congrats on closing this round Sytse!

~~~
sytse
Thank you very much. Glad to hear it is working well for you.

------
bberenberg
Be careful when considering the market share of these vendors based on
anecdotal SaaS experience. A large portion of their revenue comes from their
enterprise editions which are hosted in-house. We're seeing significant growth
by GitLab in this area with our enterprise clients.

~~~
CapnCrunchie
I previously worked at GitLab, and I can confirm this is the point that I find
most commenters on HN miss. GitLab's web platform, at the moment, is
essentially a marketing expense to get people to use GitLab and push it into
their day jobs.

------
bnchrch
To who ever is doubting gitlab right now:

Checkout their CI/CD flow in combination with their Docker/Kube integration.
You'll see why they are poised to steal the rug from under github.

------
whoisjuan
I use GitLab for all my side projects. I personally love the integrated CI/CD.
But there's one thing that I absolutely hate and is their hierarchy model for
repos. In GitHub, repos are first class citizens. For some reason, I feel that
in GitLab you get a diluted repo experience.

I think I would abandon GitLab altogether if Microsoft ever makes private
repos free.

~~~
jramsay
Thanks for the feedback. I’m a Product Manager for Create (Git, merge requests
etc) at GitLab. Why do you think the repository part of the project isn’t
clear enough? What would make GitLab’s repo capabilities less diluted for you?
I want to make sure using Git with GitLab is great.

------
gm3dmo
Gitlab. The Evernote of source control.

------
fisherfriesuk
Zoinks!

I have wanted to and tried to like GitLab. I can't. Everything about it is
less than half baked, most of all their CI stuff. It's hard to see them having
line of sight to a $1B valuation when they can't do the basics and are trying
to recreate the terrible monolithic systems of years gone by. That's not a
world I want to live in ever again...

~~~
pritianka
I'm sorry to hear that. We value iteration over perfection and so that can be
jarring sometimes. I am surprised to hear about the CI experience though. Did
you try the Auto DevOps pipeline or just CI generally? Would love to help out
if you are open. Twitter.com/pritianka DM me!

~~~
jl-gitlab
To add on, we are actively working on balancing how we deliver new and deep
solutions, CI in particular is an area where we want to provide better
solutions for more complex problems (as well as address some of the challenges
like hung builds or other issues people are running into.) You can read about
our vision for CI here:
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/)

I'd also be up for a chat sometime if you'd like to talk about some of the
issues that are impacting you and what we might be able to do to help.
twitter.com/j4lenn

------
mwj
Maybe they can spend some of that cash improving the atrocious service levels
on gitlab.com

------
sidcool
This may be a reaction to Microsoft's GitHub acquisition. They need a stronger
competition.

------
catwell
And so, the clock starts.

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19)

~~~
dasmoth
It is somewhat remarkable that the first reply to that (in 2012!) was "Smells
like the next Microsoft acquisition to me."

------
dblock
Right now sales people at GitHub are trying to convert our $200 grandfathered
plan into a $2000 one per month at no avail because we can just move over to
Gitlab and get same or better service. I’m thankful for Gitlab’s existence and
am just watching this unfold popcorn at hand. I bet I can probably cut that
$200 bill into a $0 if I asked Gitlab now after their big fundraise.

------
neom
As Jack Welch says, strive to be #1 or #2 in your industry, seems gitlab is
well positioned to make a run at this, and given the price tag Github set for
this type of product in the devtool space, 1.1 seems very respectable. Nice
work Gitlab CEO, good luck! :)

------
georgewsinger
To people who have used GitLab: is there any way in which GitLab is not just
an incremental improvement over GitHub? Or is there something I'm missing?
(Genuine question; not trolling).

~~~
bovermyer
It's different. GitLab is more of a one-stop-shop for source control, CI,
operations concerns, etc. GitHub is more of a social network.

Both are good at what they do. I don't consider them to be direct competitors,
except in that the general public thinks they are.

~~~
pknopf
I agree.

GitHub = social, more ideal for open source projects.

GitLab = internal single solution for dev shops.

------
Lorin
I wonder if that means they'll finally create a dark theme which has been on
the request list for years and has been pushed from releases time and time
again.

------
oliv3r
While I'm a huge GitLab fan since June 4th, but one thing that concerns me
greatly, which hopefully will be resolved with this extra money, is the huge
number of growing issues.

What's even more scary herein is, that some issues/feature request get put on
the back-burner because "there's bigger problems to solve" or "more valueable
features to build"

------
pankajdoharey
$1.1 Billion? That too much, even Github hasn't reached profitability yet
inspite of being the most popular Code hosting site. Gitlab can never reach
the level of popularity that Github has. Then how are they valuing it at the
price point? Some of Khoslas investment lately are so off, for instance the
'Hyperloop' transport Inc.

------
ddtaylor
GitLab is pretty awesome. I switched for many of my projects over the last few
months and I'm most enjoying the time tracking functionality. Very simple, yet
very powerful. It's nice to be able to estimate or track time using commit
messages or a command line helper tool like gtt.

------
voidr
> “Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,”
> GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat.

Either the GitLab CEO has never heard about Jenkins and TeamCity or he is
making false statements to get more investor money.

------
tschellenbach
I wonder how well they explain to their employees how this can wipe out their
upside. Venture Deals by Brad Feld is a great read to help understand why this
is potentially a dangerous situation to be in:
[https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitali...](https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitalist/dp/1118443616)

~~~
yhoiseth
I’d be interested in hearing more, but not enough to read an entire book. Can
you please elaborate or link to a shorter text, such as a blog post?

------
dna_polymerase
Okay, are we starting migrating to another hosted Git service right now or do
we wait for them to start behaving shady and eventually selling out? Asking
for a friend.

------
kasbah
Great news! For Kitspace [1] I am currently working on re-purposing GitLab for
electronics projects. It's good to see that "upstream" is getting more
financial support.

I believe GitLab being open source is going to save me a ton of time and it
could do this in other areas as well. I always thought GitHub could have been
a much more remarkable product if it had been open source given its community.
Let's make it happen with GitLab.

[1]: [https://kitspace.org](https://kitspace.org)

------
dirtylowprofile
I run GitLab on my server and it is just too slow, sometimes I get a 503. I
hope they take a look at this asap.

------
thsowers
Came to the comments to complain about GitLab not having language stats on a
repo landing page, as I thought that was the #1 missing feature. Very pleased
to see it was added three months ago!

Surprised it took this long, this is one of the first things I look at when
considering contributing to a repo: Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)?

~~~
Jedd
Neat that you got that complaint in first, then conceded it was invalid, then
made it again.

> Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)?

If English is your first language, proficiency would include knowing that
possessive its has no apostrophe. : )

------
hal1
Looks like a rampant acquisition by Google imho

------
sbmthakur
On a related note, is Gitlab profitable?

------
village-idiot
$1.1B in valuation is insane, and seems to exist to justify $100M funding
rounds.

------
shdh
GitLab is far superior to GitHub

------
sjg007
Is there room for one more?

------
devstevedev
Maybe they can improve the awful performance. They keep denying it's due to
their site being in Ruby, but I don't buy it. Rewrite it in Go already.

~~~
YorickPeterse
[https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png) (backend
request timings for the past 24 hours) indicates Ruby isn't as bad of a choice
as you might think.

~~~
merb
actually mean is at 128ms, which is not really good...

besides mean is not what you should actually target.

------
cschep
wow.

