Because that’s the TAM without enterprise cross sell, which you only get once sucked up into the spaceship. Teams, GitHub, with Microsoft, Slack with Salesforce, Hashicorp with IBM, and so on.

You either grind and love the grind, and make peace with your slice of the industry (Automattic [$7.5B value], for example) or you sell out and up when you get bored or tired.

If they take VC money there are only two possible end goals. Go public or get bought. VC investment needs to be payed back.

Because GitLab couldn't be bothered to be a great, reliable, focused, self-hosted code development and CI/CD solution. They had to tack on half-baked copies of every dev tool in existence.

Monopoly laws are not strong enough

In tech, adoption follows a Power Law curve.

If you’re not the top 1 (or 2) in what you do, your fighting for extremely small slices of market share.

It tends to go in cycles, with phases where companies are merged into conglomerates and then phases where parts are spun off into separate companies. There are various reasons for both parts of the cycle.

Megacorps are too powerful and have the ability to spend to get to low costs and high margins. They can also spend heavily and take losses for years in search of that efficient mature product. Then there’s all the blatantly anti competitive stuff like bundling things into existing contracts. Nothing will fix the consolidation unless we talk about this more and change the law. It’s not healthy for society to be controlled by a government and a handful of too big to fail companies.

in the beginning, the universe is a soup of particles with small density variations, over time things pull apart, giant stars form and consume more matter, giant galaxies, expanding away from each other more and more.