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Comment by priansh | Hacker News Reader

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 & preserve the reasons people opt for GitLab over GitHub.

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Source? Look at MongoDB, Okta, Datadog, Elastic, etc... they wanted more capital, I'm sure their staff wanted liquid equity, this seems like a win for everyone.

MongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they?

Which developer tools have not done well?

Atlassian too

Docker is the main one I can think of that has flopped financially despite being widely use.

Docker has never gone public.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker

... and it hasn't actually flopped. It just reached its level of... usefulness. As others commented a few weeks ago in a different conversation, Swarm had/has significant utility for smaller deployments, but K8S has sucked the air out of the (marketing) room. So life goes on, as does docker and Docker Hub. Many of us small potatoes users will continue to use docker until we can't, and then probably wind up on podman, or lxd. That will be OK too: as long as the work gets done. We survived the demise of Solaris Freeware, we'll survive this too.

twilio is not a developer tool. twilio is a communications company that has great developer outreach

with the clever “ask your developer” billboard campaign

"... twilio is not a developer tool ..."

Thank you. Strongly agree.

Every day I run into something Twilio could be doing to make development and tooling and workflows better for people who are actually using twilio for telephony.

Instead, they are spending their time, energy and acquisition dollars building "customer engagement at scale" which is a fancy term for spam.

Twilio’s product is an API.

The end-user of (most of) their products are developers.

the product is the communications. the people on the phone. reading sms. getting emails. the end user of twilio’s products probably have never heard of twilio and don’t even know their using it

Perhaps a better way to phrase it: Twilio’s customers are developers.

Their products are built to be used by developers.

As an analogy, AWS’s customer is Netflix. Not the end user who is watching a movie that streams out of an EC2 instance.

And their product is for developers.

Are you trying to claim that AWS is not for developers because the end users who visit website hosted on AWS are not developers?

What do you mean? There are tons of developer tools doing great on the market?

DDOG, PD, DOCN, FSLY, NET, TWLO, MDB, TEAM, etc

All of those are doing great, and there are probably like 50 more.

I write extensively about developer businesses and markets: https://tylerjewell.substack.com/p/developer-led-landscape-2...

What private companies do you have an eye on?

Like Atlassian? (Now at a $100B valuation on the public market)

I'd expect M&A since their competitors are owned by larger companies with a suite of developer productivity offerings.

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