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Comment by cjdu | Hacker News Reader

:/ 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.

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> Good on Sid for fleecing the VCs though how GitLab ever supports that valuation is beyond me.

Good on the VCs who have deep connections to Google, Amazon, SalesForce, SAP, Oracle, Apple, etc. to make some serious money by selling GitLab to them at some point.

I am very critical of VCs, but when it comes to a market for selling software development tools, you have a limitless balance sheet out there (easily in the $200B market range).

Investors who clearly "not understanding the [software development] market" include:

Google Ventures (ya know, that Google)

Iconiq (Zuck family office provider)

Khosla (founder of Sun Microsystems)

Shaking my head...

> Good on the VCs who have deep connections to Google, Amazon, SalesForce, SAP, Oracle, Apple, etc. to make some serious money by selling GitLab to them at some point.

All of these companies have their own internal version control, and its highly doubtful that any of them would switch over to a third-party service.

All of these companies have their own internal version control, and its highly doubtful that any of them would switch over to a third-party service.

I get the impress "selling GitLab" to them literally means selling the company to them.

Exactly how much do you think they're spending on internal version control that they could ever justify spending over a billion dollars on gitlab???

Microsoft bought GitHub and it wasn’t for internal use.

There's a few people confusing the purchase of software and the purchase of a software company. Sorry for not being more clear.

I'm specifically talking about the fact that all of those companies have massive amounts of cash that they could buy the company and it would create an ROI from the profit it generates.

Microsoft also had its own internal version control...

This. I've never used any of their products but I've always found their marketing to be spot on. They perfectly positioned themselves as a 3rd option to GitHub and BitBucket. With the GitHub acquisition and Atlassian's stock on fire right now, they were in the perfect position to go for an insane valuation.

I've used all three and I prefer GitLab.

Agreed. Gitlab is cool but $1 billion valuation? Seriously? Do they even have significant marketshare over GitHub and Bitbucket?

Given that a few months ago GitHub was valued at $7.5bn, why would GitLab need to have higher marketshare to get to the $1bn valuation?

I think we should interpret “over” as “within the context of”.

Good point, I may have misunderstood the comment.

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/ 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).

Also, as Sid has publicly stated (not that that's special, we state everything publicly lol) our goal is IPO 2020, not a Series D. We are on the way!

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.

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

Yeah, just use your personal!

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