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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
by priansh 5y ago
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.
- statictype 5y agoMongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they? Which developer tools have not done well?
- camjohnson26 5y agoAtlassian too
- HideousKojima 5y agoDocker is the main one I can think of that has flopped financially despite being widely use.
- riffic 5y agoDocker has never gone public. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker
- ncphil 5y ago... 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.
- foolfoolz 5y agotwilio is not a developer tool. twilio is a communications company that has great developer outreach
- vmception 5y agowith the clever “ask your developer” billboard campaign
- rsync 5y ago"... 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.
- statictype 5y agoTwilio’s product is an API. The end-user of (most of) their products are developers.
- foolfoolz 5y agothe 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
- statictype 5y agoPerhaps 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.
- heytherewhat 5y agoAnd 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?
- spullara 5y agoLike Atlassian? (Now at a $100B valuation on the public market)
- lawrencevillain 5y agoSource? 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.
- TylerJewell 5y agoI write extensively about developer businesses and markets: https://tylerjewell.substack.com/p/developer-led-landscape-2021-edition https://tylerjewell.substack.com/p/developer-led-landscape-2...
- moneywoes 5y agoWhat private companies do you have an eye on?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wefarrell 5y agoI'd expect M&A since their competitors are owned by larger companies with a suite of developer productivity offerings.
- dubcanada 5y agoWhat 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.