> A mistake GitLab made, and continued to make when I left, was not caring enough about scalability. Yes, directors would say it was important and improvements were certainly made, but it was never as much of a priority as other goals. At the heart of this problem lies the way GitLab makes money: it primarily earns money from customers self-hosting GitLab Enterprise Edition, not GitLab.com. In fact, GitLab.com always cost much more money than it brought in.

Is that really a mistake, then? As a first approximation, company has to invest in the thing which makes money, not the thing which loses money. Now, higher-order thinking might suggest that a more-performant gitlab.com might bring in more customers, build a stronger reputation and so forth. Still, if the company’s real business is selling self-hosted software, it makes sense to focus development resources on self-hosted software.