All-Remote GitLab Valued at $15B in NASDAQ's First-Ever Livestreamed IPO Day (forbes.com) 18
"Long before the pandemic, software business GitLab operated fully remotely, building its developer tools without any physical office..." remembers Forbes.
"The company went public on Thursday on Nasdaq under the ticker 'GTLB.' Priced at $77, shares of GitLab closed their first day of trading at $103.89, up 35%, giving GitLab a market cap of nearly $15 billion." In an interview, CEO Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced "see brandy") said that going public would help GitLab to remain a well-resourced, long-standing steward of the open-source project on top of which its business software is built. "This had to happen sometime," Sijbrandij says. "We knew we were ready, the markets were ready, so why not take the step today?" At its closing price on Thursday, GitLab's IPO has made Sijbrandij a new tech billionaire, with an equity stake valued at $2.3 billion; in addition, he also sold about $150 million worth of Gitlab shares as part of the company's offering.
With revenue of $58 million in its previous quarter, up 69% year over year, on losses of $40 million, GitLab fits the mold of a classic high-growth, unprofitable business-to-business software provider — cloud players that have in recent years proven popular, and able to command high multiples, with Wall Street. While its losses have narrowed recently, GitLab still generates about $1.50 in new business for each $1 spent by customers previously on its tools, putting it in elite company in the category...
The company was the first-ever on Nasdaq to livestream its entire IPO day, with about 18,000 people stopping by over the course of the broadcast, it says.... Sijbrandij also became known as one of remote work's leading evangelists, advocating a no-hybrid, radically transparent office culture he says is fairer and more productive. That purist view remains a hiring advantage, he tells Forbes now; it also helps explain the livestream, part marketing opportunity and part way to include GitLab employees and advocates across the globe. "It's always behind closed doors," Sijbrandij says of the IPO festivities and listing process. Originally from the Netherlands, Sijbrandij added his parents were two of the viewers. "It was awesome to share it with the world."
"The company went public on Thursday on Nasdaq under the ticker 'GTLB.' Priced at $77, shares of GitLab closed their first day of trading at $103.89, up 35%, giving GitLab a market cap of nearly $15 billion." In an interview, CEO Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced "see brandy") said that going public would help GitLab to remain a well-resourced, long-standing steward of the open-source project on top of which its business software is built. "This had to happen sometime," Sijbrandij says. "We knew we were ready, the markets were ready, so why not take the step today?" At its closing price on Thursday, GitLab's IPO has made Sijbrandij a new tech billionaire, with an equity stake valued at $2.3 billion; in addition, he also sold about $150 million worth of Gitlab shares as part of the company's offering.
With revenue of $58 million in its previous quarter, up 69% year over year, on losses of $40 million, GitLab fits the mold of a classic high-growth, unprofitable business-to-business software provider — cloud players that have in recent years proven popular, and able to command high multiples, with Wall Street. While its losses have narrowed recently, GitLab still generates about $1.50 in new business for each $1 spent by customers previously on its tools, putting it in elite company in the category...
The company was the first-ever on Nasdaq to livestream its entire IPO day, with about 18,000 people stopping by over the course of the broadcast, it says.... Sijbrandij also became known as one of remote work's leading evangelists, advocating a no-hybrid, radically transparent office culture he says is fairer and more productive. That purist view remains a hiring advantage, he tells Forbes now; it also helps explain the livestream, part marketing opportunity and part way to include GitLab employees and advocates across the globe. "It's always behind closed doors," Sijbrandij says of the IPO festivities and listing process. Originally from the Netherlands, Sijbrandij added his parents were two of the viewers. "It was awesome to share it with the world."
Re:Serious question (Score:4, Insightful)
A few reasons:
* It can run fairly well on a Raspberry Pi, so it can be used for home serving. Of course, it works well on better hardware, but it is nice it runs decently under such limited circumstances.
* The price is right. A GHE appliance isn't cheap, even though GHE works incredibly well, and it is easy to upgrade and maintain.
* It can handle the advanced stuff, like task runners, signed Git commits, and so on.
There are a few downsides... the config files can be hairy to mess with, and after an edit, it can take time for all the subtasks to refresh. However, since Bitbucket is no longer a player for anything but data center, it is pretty much this or GHE for on prem.
Hopefully GOGS or Gitea can add more features as both are very lightweight servers, stuff like signed commits, as those are a nice alternative if one just needs basic features.
Re: Serious question (Score:2)
So one of the following is true:
Basically nothing that justifies a $15B valuation or GitHub now commands a significant valuation above the paltry $8B that Microsoft bought them for
Re:Serious question (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone use this over Github? Because they don't like MS?
You can just remove the question mark from your second sentence and you've answered your own question.
Why wouldn't someone use GitLab? Your question seems to suggest it's a vastly inferior product when that's not true.
I understand older projects that were tied to GitHub before the Microsoft purchase remaining there for continuity's sake. I don't understand why anyone would start a new project using it.
Re: (Score:2)
Because GitLab is accessible over IPv6, whereas GitHub is stuck on legacy IPv4 which introduces extra costs and security risks.
Most of my dev boxes are IPv6-only because it's cheaper, they can pull from GitLab but require extra unnecessary hoops to access GitHub.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone use this over Github? Because they don't like MS?
That's good enough for me. But it's also opensource and I can run a private copy.
Broadly speaking, there's no particularly good reason to use Github.
(pronounced "see brandy") (Score:2)
Pricing pre IPO (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Which is another reason to consider GitLab, as being open source you can always self host, or use a different hosting provider - you're not tied in to a single provider.
Re: (Score:3)
git itself is open source and you can self-host without any of these hubs or labs or whatever websites. It already is used over ssh even with these sites.
Re: Pricing pre IPO (Score:2)
Self hosting and remote hosting is probably best. First, I hope we agree open sourcing common repetitive work adds value to everyone, as the open source community can be part of any reworking of such process and lead to both optimization and extension.
Then you keep the more pedantic parts of your product in your closed source repository. Since the devil is in the details, it's my opinion this adds very little value to any competition while building a certain rapport as an organization.
15B as in "15 billion"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously?
GitLab is a neat tool, don't get me wrong, and the crew deserves all the money they can get.
But 15 billion for a tool that is know for the fact that people can install and run it themselves just confirms what we already observe: post scarcity economy, too much money in the market, assessing future value increasingly becoming a gamble. Just like the recent crypto and nft craze.
Re:15B as in "15 billion"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah those were my thoughts too. How is a company with $58 million in revenues worth $15000 million
I understand all the 'growth potential' thing, but surely that is not without risk (competitors arriving, technology platform shifts occurring). Yet investors have basically priced in no risk, not even systemic ones due to the huge amount of govt support required for markets due to the pandemic.
And that's before you even get to the fact they are making a loss!
If they could run their company at ~50% gross margins (which is extremely optimistic, but hey) then they could, at most, be generating around $30m profits right now. That means the company would have to run for 500 years to pay back investors their initial capital. Even if they grow it 10x, it will still take 50 years. I mean, wow. Huge amounts of future growth are already priced in, and yet investors buying today must be almost completely doing so because they expect even higher share prices in the future (because even in a highly optimistic case, they will all be dead before they can ever earn out a decent return from cashflow).
Re: 15B as in "15 billion"? (Score:4, Informative)
$58 million per quarter that puts them at $230M per year. That is about where GitHub was when they were purchased. Considering the massive inflation from QE:Covid edition, this is probably an indication the greater economic house of cards is starting to sway in the breeze