[hsribei]

Gitlab also took VC money and have an exit as their only option. Doubt they'll get as far as GitHub did though, and the option to just grow slowly into a solid independent business is off the table. Probably an acquihire with small return to investors.

[ameister14]

Gitlab is really open about building to a 2020 IPO

"We want to IPO in 2020, specifically on Wednesday November 18. 2020 is five years after the first people got stock options with 4 years of vesting. To IPO we need more than $100m in revenue. To achieve that we want to double Incremental Annual Contract Value (IACV) every year. We focus on an incremental number instead of growth of our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) because ARR growth is misleading. So far we achieved the goal of doubling IACV in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017."

[hsribei]

Great find! Here's the source link: https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence-

[indigochill]

A big difference being Gitlab is open source and can be self-hosted, so you can still run Gitlab on your own terms even after (insert faceless corporate entity here) buys it.

If you care about such things, anyway.