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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Submarine piece? Lots of successful startups grow into large companies or exit without being remote, and remote startups fail just as easily. GitLab's success is arguably because of developer disenchantment with Github, as well as Gitlab giving more away for free than Github (VCS, CICD pipeline, etc), regardless of employee location arrangement.

Also, what is "success"? Taking $150MM (EDIT: corrected) in investment and not showing profitability [1]? I am not against the startup underdog story (a rising tide lifts all boats). I am against marketing fluff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425

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I agree 100% that being remote has nothing to do with success.

However that link points to Github taking $350M, and they had been around for a few years before they took their first VC $. Until September, Gitlab had been pretty light on the funding, relatively speaking. (about $150M total, and that's after a $100M round in September)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-f...

> Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing profitability

That's an odd thing to say. Most companies that take investment aren't profitable- that's kind of the point of taking VC: you want the cash in order to greatly grow the business more than if you were sitting within profitability the entire time. There's a difference between "unprofitable" and "choosing not to be profitable".

What's more, GitHub wasn't profitable the last ~5 years or so, from the day they took VC. But they sold for $7.5B, so it doesn't seem that Microsoft has a problem with their "unprofitability". That's how many solid, foundational companies are created.

Taking investment is not success though. Maybe one day Gitlab will exit (most likely outcome). Maybe one day they'll be profitable. Those days are not here, and that would be success. That has not occurred yet.

Also, their business model is “GitHub, but cheaper”.

We now know what GitHub was worth, and it puts the lie to inflated valuations in this space. When $8Bn is a huge deal for your industry, it gets hard to sell higher valuations with a straight face.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion about GitLab's business model? GitLab is pretty clear on the homepage. The business model is to compete in 9 different categories, only one of which is GitHub. (GitLab pricing is also higher than GitHub which makes sense when the offering provides more the functionality.)

Gitlab is absolutely not higher than GitHub, unless you ignore all of the people who are running self-hosted Gitlab for free.

GitHub makes most of its revenue from the self-hosted market. GitLab is burning this market to the ground.

I doubt that - GitHub makes most of it's money from SaaS market I'd have thought.

GH Enterprise pricing is $21 /user/mo [1]

GL Ultimate pricing is $99 /user/mo [2]

[1] https://github.com/pricing/enterprise [2] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed

Many, many stories in magazines and newspapers start with a PR pitch. There's nothing especially noteworthy about it. It's how lots of stories get started.

To your broader point, I expect both extreme butt-in-seats and extreme remote are one of those characteristics you can map to successful and unsuccessful companies and you can probably find just about any pattern you want to find. (And of course most companies are some sort of blended model depending on company and function.)

So we're in agreement this is a non-story? "GitLab's Secret To Saving On Office Space Expenses (EDIT: And Wages)" would've been a truthful (albeit less sensational) headline.

I don't think it's so much saving on office expenses. They also get access to a lot of talent, and yes, sometimes for less than if they were in the Bay Area. This isn't an especially original story; it's been written about before. But it is still interesting for those not already in the know that you have fully remote companies.

    > Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing profitability

As far as I can tell (from our investor data and what not) and without sharing anything sensitive/confidential, we (= GitLab) are doing just fine financially.

I wasn't commenting on your runway (which at your burn rate, should be roughly 2 years), but this news piece's definition of success. If you had held your product up as your achievement (regardless of profitability), and not the fact that you're remote, I would've said nothing as the product is (mostly) solid.

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